Monday, 10 March 2014

A few boards from the opening shots of a recent project for a well known drinks manufacturer. The director I was working with wanted lots of close-ups of a cocktail being made; ice tumbling into a glass, alcohol being poured etc... lots of drink-porn type shots. Good fun to do, though as usual, I had loads to produce and very little time to.

Thursday, 23 January 2014

This storyboarding job is pretty epic. I've had to blast through around 100 storyboards over the last week and as a consequence I've had to really speed up production. Not all of them are as polished as these few. I've just finished another section today, and as I knew I was coming to the end I was in the mood to have a pleasant day drawing. I really enjoyed doing these ones, a little gory perhaps, but fun to draw.

Do I need to explain what's going on? The chap in the foreground has been run over - the chap in the background is cleaning brains off the bonnet.

Friday, 22 November 2013

So, I've been asked about how I've been putting
these storyboards together so rather than posting excerpts and
arbitrary boards as I have been doing recently, I thought I'd do a more comprehensive blog post
about how I go about it.

I've been working on preproduction for a Noir
feature film: gangsters and hit men, car chases and robberies – all
that good stuff. So from start to finish:

Script/shotlist. This is what I receive from my
client. Sometimes it's a brief description, for example “Shot
30: MCU on Jared, front on, waiting coolly in the driver’s seat.
(Camera is peering in through front windscreen)” Sometimes
it's a lot more precise, sometimes I'll get a reference photo or a
thumbnail included with a quick doodle from the production team when
they're wanting something specific.

Next, backgrounds. In most
cases I make the backgrounds in 3D. I can get more detailed
backgrounds in there and surprisingly it also works out quicker, if
there are multiple shots in the same location I can just move the camera around a little bit and tweak the lighting. It's also useful to
get the exact shot I'm looking for and gives me a lot more control
over the scene. It's essentially a mini set for me to play
around with. Also over the course of jobs that I've finished, I've
built up an archive of models; items and locations that I can place
in the scene. Of course some items still need to be made... such as
this moose head from a bar scene in “The Dark Road.” I don't know
if I'll ever need to make a moose head again. If I do, well, I've got
one now.

Then I simply draw the
characters directly into the computer, a few tweaks to the tones and
mood lighting for the final polish and it's done.

Why do I use 3D for the backgrounds? Well, I'm
working towards combining my animation work and the storyboarding
work into animatics next year. I saw this superb work and realised that I'm doing something very similar with my work. If
you saw the "Noir" animation I released earlier this year, it's pretty
much the same idea; hand-drawn characters over 3D backgrounds.

Finally, here's a quick demo of another shot:

68. TWO SHOT, Jared and Sam in Ryan’s
mansion. They have turned the place upside down (piles of smashed
junk everywhere), books pulled out of a bookcase (RHS frame). At the
back of the shot a large, tall window, with one pane has been smashed
(their entry route). To the left Jared (facing away from camera) is
searching through items (chucking stuff behind him). Sam is in MCU,
LHS frame. He is holding a book, looking at it. The book’s title
is ‘The Suicide Club."